Trying to stop smoking? Smokers have considerably more success when they use nicotine patches or prescription medications than when they try to go it alone, an international study found. Past research has yielded conflicting evidence on the effectiveness of such aids since they seem to work in clinical trials, but less so in a real-life setting. But the current researchers, whose findings appear in the journal Addiction, found that some quitting aids were linked to four-to-six-fold higher success rates.